The Next Chapter: Jama is Redefining Product Delivery

Eric Winquist | April 23, 2013

I love helping companies build great products and services. I believe strongly that successful product delivery is a function of good processes, good technology, and your most important asset of all—people. Tools alone don’t deliver products; people do. This informs the news I am excited to share today from Jama HQ. This week, we are launching the next chapter of Jama’s story with the release of Jama Spring 2013 Release, a new website and a brand-new look and feel.

Last year, I had a chance to spend time traveling the country talking with customers and seeing how they use Jama. I heard from our customers that getting requirements right, reuse across the organization, traceability, testing and managing change are critical and fundamental to product success. Projects are getting more and more complex, and teams need tools to help manage all the moving parts. But what I heard most of all was how critical collaboration and communication are, at all phases of development. Yet teams are still resorting to email, office documents and chat tools, keeping conversations removed from the development. Even though Jama Review Center is praised for speeding development cycles, preventing errors and eliminating meetings, we want to raise that bar even higher. This is why the new Jama focuses on Product Delivery.

What is Product Delivery?

Product delivery is the process of people across the organization working together to design, scope, build and deliver products to customers that solve real problems and create business value in new ways. Product delivery is bigger than product development. It begins much earlier in the product lifecycle—at the concept phase—and goes all the way to delivery into customers’ hands. Product delivery is a business process. It’s strategic. It’s not something confined to the development teams, and as such it requires pulling the right people across the entire enterprise together to make the daily decisions necessary to move projects forward.

Today’s high-functioning workforce uses technologies like mobile, social and the cloud in their personal lives, and they’re getting desperate for the same efficiency in the office. Product teams are looking for new ways to work together, innovate faster and solve problems more efficiently.

To date, options for modern product delivery tools have been few. When you see them, they are generally ad-hoc solutions pieced together. This is why everyone outside the product team resorts to the lowest common denominator—email, PowerPoint, spreadsheets, meetings and whiteboards—to get their work done.

Jama integrated the best from consumer technologies to make projects more efficient, more open and more fun, with less friction. We’re sparking creativity and organic, ad-hoc ways of working together, with one critical improvement: We tie it all to product delivery. We’re providing a place where every conversation about the product is part of the system of record, where they can be tied to requirements, a place where people can be pulled in to help make decisions and prevent roadblocks from slowing the product down.

We’re building on our foundation of world-class requirements, test, change management and team collaboration. Our deep functionality and experience working with many of the world’s most innovative companies puts us in a unique position to tackle the challenges of modern products.

Today marks the public introduction of our work. We are ramping up and investing heavily on behalf of our customers, doubling R&D over the next 18 months to go deeper with our existing capabilities and integrating new features to better solve bigger collaboration and communication challenges. To succeed at this, we’re hiring the best and the brightest problem solvers.

Starting today, you can get early access to the Jama spring release on our trial servers (watch for general availability soon). This release empowers teams to bring people from across the organization in for input, decisions and visibility and has the following capabilities:

Decisions: Jama enables teams to securely pull in stakeholders from across the company with one-click access for input, decisions and visibility

Capture: Jama makes it easy to engage team members in ad-hoc discussions about deliverables, projects, content and whiteboard sessions